Related papers: Global Optimality in Low-rank Matrix Optimization
This paper considers general rank-constrained optimization problems that minimize a general objective function $f(X)$ over the set of rectangular $n\times m$ matrices that have rank at most $r$. To tackle the rank constraint and also to…
Low-rank matrix recovery is a fundamental problem in signal processing and machine learning. A recent very popular approach to recovering a low-rank matrix X is to factorize it as a product of two smaller matrices, i.e., X = UV^T, and then…
This work considers two popular minimization problems: (i) the minimization of a general convex function $f(\mathbf{X})$ with the domain being positive semi-definite matrices; (ii) the minimization of a general convex function…
We propose a general theory for studying the \xl{landscape} of nonconvex \xl{optimization} with underlying symmetric structures \tz{for a class of machine learning problems (e.g., low-rank matrix factorization, phase retrieval, and deep…
We show that there are no spurious local minima in the non-convex factorized parametrization of low-rank matrix recovery from incoherent linear measurements. With noisy measurements we show all local minima are very close to a global…
Matrix factorization is a popular approach for large-scale matrix completion. The optimization formulation based on matrix factorization can be solved very efficiently by standard algorithms in practice. However, due to the non-convexity…
Recently, convex formulations of low-rank matrix factorization problems have received considerable attention in machine learning. However, such formulations often require solving for a matrix of the size of the data matrix, making it…
We study the minimization of a convex function $f(X)$ over the set of $n\times n$ positive semi-definite matrices, but when the problem is recast as $\min_U g(U) := f(UU^\top)$, with $U \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times r}$ and $r \leq n$. We study…
In this paper we develop a new framework that captures the common landscape underlying the common non-convex low-rank matrix problems including matrix sensing, matrix completion and robust PCA. In particular, we show for all above problems…
We investigate how to solve smooth matrix optimization problems with general linear inequality constraints on the eigenvalues of a symmetric matrix. We present solution methods to obtain exact global minima for linear objective functions,…
This work investigates the geometry of a nonconvex reformulation of minimizing a general convex loss function $f(X)$ regularized by the matrix nuclear norm $\|X\|_*$. Nuclear-norm regularized matrix inverse problems are at the heart of many…
Techniques involving factorization are found in a wide range of applications and have enjoyed significant empirical success in many fields. However, common to a vast majority of these problems is the significant disadvantage that the…
There is a recent surge of interest in nonconvex reformulations via low-rank factorization for stochastic convex semidefinite optimization problem in the purpose of efficiency and scalability. Compared with the original convex formulations,…
We address the problem of minimizing a convex function over the space of large matrices with low rank. While this optimization problem is hard in general, we propose an efficient greedy algorithm and derive its formal approximation…
Optimization problems with rank constraints arise in many applications, including matrix regression, structured PCA, matrix completion and matrix decomposition problems. An attractive heuristic for solving such problems is to factorize the…
A rank-$r$ matrix $X \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times n}$ can be written as a product $U V^\top$, where $U \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times r}$ and $V \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times r}$. One could exploit this observation in optimization: e.g., consider the…
Trace norm regularization is a widely used approach for learning low rank matrices. A standard optimization strategy is based on formulating the problem as one of low rank matrix factorization which, however, leads to a non-convex problem.…
We develop a rigorous framework for global non-convex optimization by reformulating the minimization problem as a discounted infinite-horizon optimal control problem. For non-convex, continuous, and possibly non-smooth objective functions…
Optimization over low rank matrices has broad applications in machine learning. For large scale problems, an attractive heuristic is to factorize the low rank matrix to a product of two much smaller matrices. In this paper, we study the…
In this note, we focus on smooth nonconvex optimization problems that obey: (1) all local minimizers are also global; and (2) around any saddle point or local maximizer, the objective has a negative directional curvature. Concrete…